In a recent article featured in Leadership Journal, there is an interview with Neil Cole and Ed Young, Jr. about two different styles of mission and church organization. In Starfish and Spider terms, you couldn’t get a better comparison and contrast:
Ed Young, Jr. with 20,000 worshippers in five different sites (in two different states) all projecting one of his sermons is the self-proclaimed: “Dude with the food”. He is the pastor, the visionary and the chief influencer of the mega church. For Young, this doesn’t mean as the Senior Pastor that he is all controlling, but in his own words: “I believe churches are led by leaders. I believe God gives one person the vision—the pastor. I don't believe a committee-led church can be as effective as a pastor-led church. That doesn't mean a pastor shouldn't be accountable to anyone. It's not a dictatorship, but there needs to be strong leadership.” Young’s Fellowship Church is the consummate, successful “Spider”. The worship service is the “port of entry” and his creative sermons are the central strategy for engaging the unchurched. Young, Worship Services, a highly structured ministry and a “pastor-led” vision are the ingredients for a successful “Spider” ministry.
Neil Cole, is a pastor and the director of Church Multiplication Associations, it has one and a half full-time employees and yet it is responsible for helping start hundreds of new churches around the country. These small, “organic” churches are not necessarily gathered in worship centers, they are just as likely to be found in coffeehouses or in diners. The central strategy for discipleship are Life-Transformation Groups that meet once a week for an hour of study, prayer and confession of sins to each other. Each member covenants’ to read 30 chapters of scripture a week and they have the missional objective of leading another person to faith. By the way, they don’t start “Coffeehouse ministries”, they go to existing coffeehouses and start building relationships. Cole’s approach couldn’t be more “Starfish” if it had barnacles.
While Young’s strategy for starting a new ministry in a new city would be to send in a team, rent space and bring a video-feed sermon into a creative worship service aimed at unchurched people who would come, Cole’s strategy is to “infect” a local area with a Christian “virus” by putting in two praying people who would work as a partnership prayerfully seeking out networks of people where they could begin to build relationships. Cole refers to Jesus’ sending of the disciples
Cole: “In Matthew 10 and Luke 10, Jesus sends his disciples out. He tells them to stay in one house, or oikos. The word really means a household; a social web of relationships. That's where they find the man of peace. When he comes to faith, rather than extracting him from his oikos and into a church, he is positioned to transform his original oikos. That transformed network becomes the church.”
It would be hard to find a better definition of a “Starfish organization” than Cole’s: Catalytic people build on pre-existing networks (coffeehouse clientele for example) to develop circles of shared (Christian) values.
This comparison is often referred to in “missional” speak as the difference between the “attractional” model (Young’s) and the “missional model” (Cole’s). (A distinction that I find quite imprecise: Didn’t Jesus ‘attract’ followers by doing mission? Shouldn’t ‘mission’ ultimately seek to ‘attract’ people to the Kingdom?) I want to suggest that the Starfish and Spider comparison is much more helpful.
First, true confession time: I have been trained at and somewhat ‘successful’ in a model that is much closer to Young’s than Cole’s. However, I am far more attracted to the more organic model that Cole suggests as closer to a strategy for reaching a rapidly changing, post-christendom world. But ultimately, I contend that neither model as they are purely put forth the is the best for helping the church in the West today move into the future.
Secondly, the organic “missional” approach that Cole suggests has, to my limited perspective, yet to figure out what it will do with “success”. What happens when a church develops “buildings and budgets” (let alone the “big shots” that he sagely warns stops all church multiplication)? And what should the church do with the resources that we already have available to us? (And what will we do with all these "consultants and coaches" that are now the new "stars" of the church instead of preachers?)
For another thing, while it is easy to denigrate the mega church movement as an attractional approach that is quickly closing out its ‘market share’ of “unchurched people” who are willing to go to a creative worship experience, in fact, there are some people who have the skill sets to keep this form of church going (especially in settings where Christendom is still the norm). Spiders are big because they are successful in some areas in some standards. (As one of my professors once said about criticisms aimed at Rick Warren and Saddleback church: “It’s pretty bad to say, ‘I don’t like the way they do evangelism better than I DON’T do evangelism’.”)
Perhaps most important to me personally, both of these models are for starting NEW churches, not renewing the Church of Jesus Christ around the world today. Viewing the comparison of these two forms of church life in the grid of “Spider and Starfish” allow us to see both as two different strategies for furthering and initiating the mission of Christ. But I contend that NEITHER of them, as they are, are applicable in most settings.
As unlikely as most pastors, (including myself) are to be the kinds of “star” preacher who can build a huge following through creativity and personality that a successful spider-led church requires, equally unlikely are there many church leaders (including myself) who have the entrepreneurial, relational skills to build discipleship circles out of thin air very naturally.
In short, the genius and giftedness of both an Ed Young, Jr. and a Neil Cole point to why they are such effective leaders themselves, but why neither of them can be the model itself (and to be sure, one of the most encouraging parts of the interview is how neither of them put themselves up to be so).
While all are called to make disciples, it takes a community to do it best. The church is usually built through communities of people with lots of different skills, abilities and giftedness all working together in as many modes as possible. We need lots of one on one conversations as well as evangelistic messages like on Mars Hill. We need to see both the disciples in the marketplaces and in the temples furthering the Kingdom. We need both “apostles” like Neil Cole and his compatriots and “Pastor-teachers” like Ed Young. (And every other gift in those famous lists from Ephesians 4:11-12, and Romans 12:3-8.)
Instead building upon the “hybrid-combo” idea of centralizing what needs to be protected and passed on (theology, values, ideology, resources—not personalities, by the way) and decentralizing strategy and tactics to fit different settings allows the church not only to develop new church plants, but to renew and reinvent current churches.
The best comment on the story, for me didn’t come in the article itself but from Rick at Blind Beggar who tipped me off to it.
I wonder how much more of an impact Young’s “church” would have if they split into 200 one hundred member local neighborhood faith communities? Of course they can’t do this (I’m conjecturing here) because they don’t have 200 mature pastoral leaders (indictment of the model) and many of the people wouldn’t stand for it because they like/want to be consumers, not disciples (an indictment of the average American believer and the model).
As Rick’s indictments point out: the key for any church to move into a more missional frame is both the development of more--and more mature--pastoral leaders (whether laity or clergy), as well as a clear cultural shift in the church away from a consumeristic frame to a discipleship frame.
And again, the “hybrid-combo” approach offers us a way to do both. Which is where we’ll pick up next post.
